Mary Wollstonecraft

Turning Reason into Action Through Resolve

Once ideas enter the world, they meet gatekeepers, traditions, and incentives that keep the status quo stable. Resolve therefore includes courage: the willingness to be unpopular, to be misunderstood, and to continue anyway. Wollstonecraft, writing amid revolutionary upheavals and harsh judgments of women who spoke publicly, understood that reformers are tested less by logic than by backlash. This is where her sentence becomes a strategy rather than a slogan. It anticipates that moral clarity will be challenged and suggests that persistence—repeated action aligned with reason—is what turns isolated insight into lasting reform. [...]

Self-Governance, Not Supremacy: Wollstonecraft’s Claim

In turn, self-governance demands legal and economic supports. The Seneca Falls Declaration (1848) and reforms like the Married Women’s Property Acts in Britain (1870, 1882) and debates influenced by Mill’s The Subjection of Women (1869) illustrate how control over earnings, contracts, and custody can operationalize ‘power over themselves.’ Without such rights, autonomy remains aspirational. Equally crucial is bodily integrity—consent, safety, and reproductive decision-making—because the self cannot be self-governing if its fundamental choices are coerced. Legal recognition of these domains translates moral equality into everyday sovereignty. [...]

Life Measured by Courage to Begin Again

Fittingly, her own biography dramatizes this ethic. After her relationship with Gilbert Imlay collapsed, she turned grief into motion, traveling through Scandinavia in 1795 and transforming hardship into insight in Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796). Soon after, she married William Godwin (1797), continuing to write until her death that same year. Although Godwin’s candid Memoirs (1798) scandalized the public and tarnished her reputation, the 20th century’s feminist scholarship revived her standing, beginning her legacy anew. From these reversals, we see that starts and restarts—personal and posthumous—can realign a life’s meaning, even when the culture is slow to recognize it. [...]